My early childhood came with a love of horses. Being with them signified happiness. My parents afforded me such opportunities as generously as they could, but it wasn’t in their ability or perhaps not even in their idea of their own lives that I should have a horse of my own. In lieu of any time with live horses I collected Breyer models and other equine imagery and lived out my dreams as a horse girl through books like Black Beauty and The Black Stallion. Looking back, disappointed as I was at not getting a horse, I can admit that it was best that one did not come under my charge then, whatever my parents’ reasoning. By the end of high school, love of horses was not gone, but pushed into the periphery.
With horses blurred into the background my artistic tendencies and attraction to foreign languages (out of the triad offered at my high school I favored French over Spanish and German) took their place as influences for who I would be when I grew up. Still, to see horses in any capacity remained a pleasure. I even got on horseback a couple of times in paid trail ride experiences, once on a friend’s horse in college and then lastly on a beach ride in Mexico with my then future husband, which we both regretted for the sheer robotic unhappiness of the horses. Generally, the horse lived in my background and I actively sought happiness elsewhere.
My late blooming development from the end of high school into college and then life on my own wound its way through a series of consequences of inaction and misjudged choices loosely directed by my artistic and creative ability and some degree of trying based on social expectations. Eventually, my life began to look normal and successful enough on the outside (fine art won in the contest of career choices) and I did feel very happy with certain accomplishments. Yet, there were failures or less than desirable results of some efforts that left me lacking self-confidence, wondering when I would find the thing that made me who I was meant to be, while not knowing exactly what that was. It was then, in this melancholy, that the horse came again into the picture by way of the racehorse called Seabiscuit.
While my identity crisis was churning I read the biography Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand. It escapes my memory how I decided to read that particular book, though it is likely that the popular and lauded Hollywood film adaptation of it brought the horse and his story to my attention after which I was curious about the non-fictionalized account. I devoured it.
Of course, Seabiscuit had no choice in the role he played in human history, though his character as a hero transferred hope and inspiration to people during the throes of the Great Depression. Not only did this story feed my insufferable hunger for something more in my life, but Hillenbrand’s story also had heroic qualities. Her perseverance to write the book while extremely ill with chronic fatigue syndrome nourished me to direct my own life with such determined purpose.
In a fiery epiphany I saw the horse as a way to that happiness that seemed missing. Memory of my childhood affinity for horses gave strength to the idea. I wasn’t just reaching for yet another new possibility, I was reaching back to something innately part of me.